The widespread popularity of mobile phones has led to increasing demands for locally networked applications and services between nearby users. Some examples include file sharing, mobile gaming, social networking and so forth. In general, such scenarios tend to occur in an unplanned, ad hoc setting, and often use a direct connection over appropriate local wireless interface such as Bluetooth® or Wi-Fi® rather than the slow and possibly expensive mobile telephone carrier's system.
By way of example, consider two users, Alice and Bob. Alice may want to share some data with Bob, such as a picture stored on her mobile telephone, which she can do by sending it to Bob's mobile telephone over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
However, is difficult to for most users to configure a network connection. For example, both Alice's phone and Bob's telephone may be Bluetooth®-enabled, however in the presence of many other devices, such as at a party, Alice cannot easily know which device is Bob's telephone among possibly many listed devices. As a more particular example, via Bluetooth®, Alice's telephone scans neighboring devices, which may find a lot of devices with basically meaningless names, like Dopodabc123, Nokia123456789 and so forth. Although Alice may physically see Bob's telephone, neither Alice nor her telephone knows from those names to which device it should connect, whereby Alice needs to have Bob inquire as to his telephone's name. Such an inquiry is not straightforward, especially with telephone models that do not provide a name-showing feature. Alternatively, Alice may start probing among all of the listed devices until Bob's telephone receives a file transfer request from some other device (likely, but not necessarily Alice's telephone). In either event, such procedures are difficult and/or tedious, whereby some users, and particularly non-technically-inclined users, will give up or not even bother with otherwise desirable data communication.